It seems like every company and his mother is asking the US government for a bailout. If you don't bail us out, people who work for us will not be able to pay for their homes, property prices will fall, the economy will fail, blah blah blah.
The latest companies to ask for a handout is GM, one of the Big Three car makers in the US (NYT, Barrons, TheStreet).
US car makers want to sound like banks, talking "liquidity" and "systemic risk".
Not everybody agrees. Philip Greenspun says let GM go bankrupt, Warren Meyer of Coyote Blog says let GM fail, not once but twice (the other time in 2005), and Paul Kedrosky on Yahoo Finance.
Seems like another case of privatizing the costs and socializing the risk to me.
Come on, when no one wants to buy your cars, no one wants to buy your cars.
Here's a headline that declared: GM Planning 40 mpg Small Car for 2009.
Big whoop. That's a little late, isn't it? There is already a 40 miles per gallon mid-sized car in the market. It's called the Toyota Prius.
Hertz supplied the one Ryan and I drove in the US, and boy, is that an excellent car (note to Singapore gahmen, your Green Vehicle Rebate is not good enough). We drove that sucker for more than a 1000 miles, and did not spend more than US$70 on gas. It was giving us consistently 45 miles per gallon throughout. That's 20km per litre of petrol. It was silent to run, and had a huge boot when you brought the rear seats down completely flat. A joy to drive.
Is it any wonder that in the US, there is the Toyota Prius and there is the rest of the hybrids? Interestingly, I found out Toyota makes cars in the US too.
Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital said it best in the above CNBC video, "Every GM job they save destroys a job somewhere else."
Nobody is saying let manufacturing jobs die in the US. Just give that business to some other company that knows how to make things the market wants, instead of propping up companies that only know how to ask for bailouts.
But then, who wants to be the guy who let an American icon that has hundreds of thousands of employees and even more retirees drawing pensions, die on his watch? He would be labeled an evil Marxist who is out to destroy the American middle-class.
Well, it's either that, or watch icons die a slow and painful death.
